OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
F8Net: Fixed-Point 8-bit Only Multiplication for Network Quantization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Neural network quantization is a promising compression technique to reduce memory footprint and save energy consumption, potentially leading to real-time inference. However, there is a performance gap between quantized and full-precision models. To reduce it, existing quantization approaches require high-precision INT32 or full-precision multiplication during inference for scaling or dequantization. This introduces a noticeable cost in terms of memory, speed, and required energy. To tackle these issues, we present F8Net, a novel quantization framework consisting of only fixed-point 8-bit multiplication. To derive our method, we first discuss the advantages of fixed-point multiplication with different formats of fixed-point numbers and study the statistical behavior of the associated fixed-point numbers. Second, based on the statistical and algorithmic analysis, we apply different fixed-point formats for weights and activations of different layers. We introduce a novel algorithm to automatically determine the right format for each layer during training. Third, we analyze a previous quantization algorithm -- parameterized clipping activation (PACT) -- and reformulate it using fixed-point arithmetic. Finally, we unify the recently proposed method for quantization fine-tuning and our fixed-point approach to show the potential of our method. We verify F8Net on ImageNet for MobileNet V1/V2 and ResNet18/50. Our approach achieves comparable and better performance, when compared not only to existing quantization techniques with INT32 multiplication or floating-point arithmetic, but also to the full-precision counterparts, achieving state-of-the-art performance.
On One-Bit Quantization
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

We consider the one-bit quantizer that minimizes the mean squared error for a source living in a real Hilbert space. The optimal quantizer is a projection followed by a thresholding operation, and we provide methods for identifying the optimal direction along which to project. As an application of our methods, we characterize the optimal one-bit quantizer for a continuous-time random process that exhibits low-dimensional structure. We numerically show that this optimal quantizer is found by a neural-network-based compressor trained via stochastic gradient descent.
Understanding the Digital News Consumption Experience During the COVID Pandemic
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

During the COVID-19 pandemic, people sought information through digital news platforms. To investigate how to design these platforms to support users' needs in a crisis, we conducted a two-week diary study with 22 participants across the United States. Participants' news-consumption experience followed two stages: in the \textbf{seeking} stage, participants increased their general consumption, motivated by three common informational needs -- specifically, to find, understand and verify relevant news pieces. Participants then moved to the \textbf{sustaining} stage, and coping with the news emotionally became as important as their informational needs. We elicited design ideas from participants and used these to distill six themes for creating digital news platforms that provide better informational and emotional support during a crisis. Thus, we contribute, first, a model of users' needs over time with respect to engaging with crisis news, and second, example design concepts for supporting users' needs in each of these stages.
Formalized functional analysis with semilinear maps
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2022
Year: 2022

Semilinear maps are a generalization of linear maps between vector spaces where we allow the scalar action to be twisted by a ring homomorphism such as complex conjugation. In particular, this generalization unifies the concepts of linear and conjugate-linear maps. We implement this generalization in Lean's \textsf{mathlib} library, along with a number of important results in functional analysis which previously were impossible to formalize properly. Specifically, we prove the Fréchet--Riesz representation theorem and the spectral theorem for compact self-adjoint operators generically over real and complex Hilbert spaces. We also show that semilinear maps have applications beyond functional analysis by formalizing the one-dimensional case of a theorem of Dieudonné and Manin that classifies the isocrystals over an algebraically closed field with positive characteristic.
The MeLa BitChute Dataset
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper we present a near-complete dataset of over 3M videos from 61K channels over 2.5 years (June 2019 to December 2021) from the social video hosting platform BitChute, a commonly used alternative to YouTube. Additionally, we include a variety of video-level metadata, including comments, channel descriptions, and views for each video. The MeLa-BitChute dataset can be found at: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/KRD1VS.
A Machine-Learning-Aided Visual Analysis Workflow for Investigating Air Pollution Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Analyzing air pollution data is challenging as there are various analysis focuses from different aspects: feature (what), space (where), and time (when). As in most geospatial analysis problems, besides high-dimensional features, the temporal and spatial dependencies of air pollution induce the complexity of performing analysis. Machine learning methods, such as dimensionality reduction, can extract and summarize important information of the data to lift the burden of understanding such a complicated environment. In this paper, we present a methodology that utilizes multiple machine learning methods to uniformly explore these aspects. With this methodology, we develop a visual analytic system that supports a flexible analysis workflow, allowing domain experts to freely explore different aspects based on their analysis needs. We demonstrate the capability of our system and analysis workflow supporting a variety of analysis tasks with multiple use cases.
Computational-Statistical Gaps in Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Reinforcement learning with function approximation has recently achieved tremendous results in applications with large state spaces. This empirical success has motivated a growing body of theoretical work proposing necessary and sufficient conditions under which efficient reinforcement learning is possible. From this line of work, a remarkably simple minimal sufficient condition has emerged for sample efficient reinforcement learning: MDPs with optimal value function $V^*$ and $Q^*$ linear in some known low-dimensional features. In this setting, recent works have designed sample efficient algorithms which require a number of samples polynomial in the feature dimension and independent of the size of state space. They however leave finding computationally efficient algorithms as future work and this is considered a major open problem in the community. In this work, we make progress on this open problem by presenting the first computational lower bound for RL with linear function approximation: unless NP=RP, no randomized polynomial time algorithm exists for deterministic transition MDPs with a constant number of actions and linear optimal value functions. To prove this, we show a reduction from Unique-Sat, where we convert a CNF formula into an MDP with deterministic transitions, constant number of actions and low dimensional linear optimal value functions. This result also exhibits the first computational-statistical gap in reinforcement learning with linear function approximation, as the underlying statistical problem is information-theoretically solvable with a polynomial number of queries, but no computationally efficient algorithm exists unless NP=RP. Finally, we also prove a quasi-polynomial time lower bound under the Randomized Exponential Time Hypothesis.
PSACCF: Prioritized Online Slice Admission Control Considering Fairness in 5G/B5G Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

5G/B5G is envisioned to support various services with the assistance of network slices, each slice instance asks for adequate resources to provide the pre-negotiated service quality to its subscribers. Slice Admission Control (SAC) algorithm is a necessity for Slice Providers (SPs) to guarantee the QoS and QoE of each admitted request with limited resources. In that circumstance, the priority concern of services and the fairness of resource allocation arise as meaningful topics for researchers. The former originates from the innate characteristics of various services supported by 5G networks, and the latter matters because slices are instantiated on shared physical equipment. However, the two issues are mainly investigated separately in the literature or do not receive sufficient research simultaneously. In this work, we study the SAC problem in 5G/B5G networks, aiming at enhancing the fairness degree on the premise of satisfying the necessary priority requirements. We first reinterpret priority as a higher cumulative service acceptance ratio (CSAR), and adopt the uniformity of adjacent CSAR gaps to reflect the fairness. Based on these adjustments, the SAC problem is formulated as a non-linear and non-convex multi-objective optimization. Thus, we propose a heuristic algorithm called Prioritized Slice Admission Control Considering Fairness (PSACCF) to solve it. It introduces the resource efficiency of services to amend priority violations, then promotes fairness by setting the target CSARs for each service type and pushing their actual CSARs toward. Numerous simulations are carried out to compare the performance of PSACCF with two existing algorithms, termed MHPF and AHPF. Results show that our algorithm can achieve a nearly identical priority indicator to the comparisons, as well as at least a 33.6% improvement in fairness degree and a higher minimum average resource utilization.
Fast Rates in Pool-Based Batch Active Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

We consider a batch active learning scenario where the learner adaptively issues batches of points to a labeling oracle. Sampling labels in batches is highly desirable in practice due to the smaller number of interactive rounds with the labeling oracle (often human beings). However, batch active learning typically pays the price of a reduced adaptivity, leading to suboptimal results. In this paper we propose a solution which requires a careful trade off between the informativeness of the queried points and their diversity. We theoretically investigate batch active learning in the practically relevant scenario where the unlabeled pool of data is available beforehand ({\em pool-based} active learning). We analyze a novel stage-wise greedy algorithm and show that, as a function of the label complexity, the excess risk of this algorithm matches the known minimax rates in standard statistical learning settings. Our results also exhibit a mild dependence on the batch size. These are the first theoretical results that employ careful trade offs between informativeness and diversity to rigorously quantify the statistical performance of batch active learning in the pool-based scenario.
Concurrent Training of a Control Policy and a State Estimator for Dynamic and Robust Legged Locomotion
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we propose a locomotion training framework where a control policy and a state estimator are trained concurrently. The framework consists of a policy network which outputs the desired joint positions and a state estimation network which outputs estimates of the robot's states such as the base linear velocity, foot height, and contact probability. We exploit a fast simulation environment to train the networks and the trained networks are transferred to the real robot. The trained policy and state estimator are capable of traversing diverse terrains such as a hill, slippery plate, and bumpy road. We also demonstrate that the learned policy can run at up to 3.75 m/s on normal flat ground and 3.54 m/s on a slippery plate with the coefficient of friction of 0.22.
Electricity Consumption Forecasting for Out-of-distribution Time-of-Use Tariffs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

In electricity markets, retailers or brokers want to maximize profits by allocating tariff profiles to end consumers. One of the objectives of such demand response management is to incentivize the consumers to adjust their consumption so that the overall electricity procurement in the wholesale markets is minimized, e.g. it is desirable that consumers consume less during peak hours when cost of procurement for brokers from wholesale markets are high. We consider a greedy solution to maximize the overall profit for brokers by optimal tariff profile allocation. This in-turn requires forecasting electricity consumption for each user for all tariff profiles. This forecasting problem is challenging compared to standard forecasting problems due to following reasons: i. the number of possible combinations of hourly tariffs is high and retailers may not have considered all combinations in the past resulting in a biased set of tariff profiles tried in the past, ii. the profiles allocated in the past to each user is typically based on certain policy. These reasons violate the standard i.i.d. assumptions, as there is a need to evaluate new tariff profiles on existing customers and historical data is biased by the policies used in the past for tariff allocation. In this work, we consider several scenarios for forecasting and optimization under these conditions. We leverage the underlying structure of how consumers respond to variable tariff rates by comparing tariffs across hours and shifting loads, and propose suitable inductive biases in the design of deep neural network based architectures for forecasting under such scenarios. More specifically, we leverage attention mechanisms and permutation equivariant networks that allow desirable processing of tariff profiles to learn tariff representations that are insensitive to the biases in the data and still representative of the task.
Unsupervised HDR Imaging: What Can Be Learned from a Single 8-bit Video?
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2022
Year: 2022

Recently, Deep Learning-based methods for inverse tone-mapping standard dynamic range (SDR) images to obtain high dynamic range (HDR) images have become very popular. These methods manage to fill over-exposed areas convincingly both in terms of details and dynamic range. Typically, these methods, to be effective, need to learn from large datasets and to transfer this knowledge to the network weights. In this work, we tackle this problem from a completely different perspective. What can we learn from a single SDR video? With the presented zero-shot approach, we show that, in many cases, a single SDR video is sufficient to be able to generate an HDR video of the same quality or better than other state-of-the-art methods.
MusIAC: An extensible generative framework for Music Infilling Applications with multi-level Control
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

We present a novel music generation framework for music infilling, with a user friendly interface. Infilling refers to the task of generating musical sections given the surrounding multi-track music. The proposed transformer-based framework is extensible for new control tokens as the added music control tokens such as tonal tension per bar and track polyphony level in this work. We explore the effects of including several musically meaningful control tokens, and evaluate the results using objective metrics related to pitch and rhythm. Our results demonstrate that adding additional control tokens helps to generate music with stronger stylistic similarities to the original music. It also provides the user with more control to change properties like the music texture and tonal tension in each bar compared to previous research which only provided control for track density. We present the model in a Google Colab notebook to enable interactive generation.
Cyclical Curriculum Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Artificial neural networks (ANN) are inspired by human learning. However, unlike human education, classical ANN does not use a curriculum. Curriculum Learning (CL) refers to the process of ANN training in which examples are used in a meaningful order. When using CL, training begins with a subset of the dataset and new samples are added throughout the training, or training begins with the entire dataset and the number of samples used is reduced. With these changes in training dataset size, better results can be obtained with curriculum, anti-curriculum, or random-curriculum methods than the vanilla method. However, a generally efficient CL method for various architectures and data sets is not found. In this paper, we propose cyclical curriculum learning (CCL), in which the data size used during training changes cyclically rather than simply increasing or decreasing. Instead of using only the vanilla method or only the curriculum method, using both methods cyclically like in CCL provides more successful results. We tested the method on 18 different data sets and 15 architectures in image and text classification tasks and obtained more successful results than no-CL and existing CL methods. We also have shown theoretically that it is less erroneous to apply CL and vanilla cyclically instead of using only CL or only vanilla method. The code of Cyclical Curriculum is available at https://github.com/CyclicalCurriculum/Cyclical-Curriculum.
Hybridization of Capsule and LSTM Networks for unsupervised anomaly detection on multivariate data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Deep learning techniques have recently shown promise in the field of anomaly detection, providing a flexible and effective method of modelling systems in comparison to traditional statistical modelling and signal processing-based methods. However, there are a few well publicised issues Neural Networks (NN)s face such as generalisation ability, requiring large volumes of labelled data to be able to train effectively and understanding spatial context in data. This paper introduces a novel NN architecture which hybridises the Long-Short-Term-Memory (LSTM) and Capsule Networks into a single network in a branched input Autoencoder architecture for use on multivariate time series data. The proposed method uses an unsupervised learning technique to overcome the issues with finding large volumes of labelled training data. Experimental results show that without hyperparameter optimisation, using Capsules significantly reduces overfitting and improves the training efficiency. Additionally, results also show that the branched input models can learn multivariate data more consistently with or without Capsules in comparison to the non-branched input models. The proposed model architecture was also tested on an open-source benchmark, where it achieved state-of-the-art performance in outlier detection, and overall performs best over the metrics tested in comparison to current state-of-the art methods.
Scale-free Unconstrained Online Learning for Curved Losses
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

A sequence of works in unconstrained online convex optimisation have investigated the possibility of adapting simultaneously to the norm $U$ of the comparator and the maximum norm $G$ of the gradients. In full generality, matching upper and lower bounds are known which show that this comes at the unavoidable cost of an additive $G U^3$, which is not needed when either $G$ or $U$ is known in advance. Surprisingly, recent results by Kempka et al. (2019) show that no such price for adaptivity is needed in the specific case of $1$-Lipschitz losses like the hinge loss. We follow up on this observation by showing that there is in fact never a price to pay for adaptivity if we specialise to any of the other common supervised online learning losses: our results cover log loss, (linear and non-parametric) logistic regression, square loss prediction, and (linear and non-parametric) least-squares regression. We also fill in several gaps in the literature by providing matching lower bounds with an explicit dependence on $U$. In all cases we obtain scale-free algorithms, which are suitably invariant under rescaling of the data. Our general goal is to establish achievable rates without concern for computational efficiency, but for linear logistic regression we also provide an adaptive method that is as efficient as the recent non-adaptive algorithm by Agarwal et al. (2021).
GenderedNews: Une approche computationnelle des écarts de représentation des genres dans la presse française
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

In this article, we present {\it GenderedNews} (\url{https://gendered-news.imag.fr}), an online dashboard which gives weekly measures of gender imbalance in French online press. We use Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods to quantify gender inequalities in the media, in the wake of global projects like the Global Media Monitoring Project. Such projects are instrumental in highlighting gender imbalance in the media and its very slow evolution. However, their generalisation is limited by their sampling and cost in terms of time, data and staff. Automation allows us to offer complementary measures to quantify inequalities in gender representation. We understand representation as the presence and distribution of men and women mentioned and quoted in the news -- as opposed to representation as stereotypification. In this paper, we first review different means adopted by previous studies on gender inequality in the media : qualitative content analysis, quantitative content analysis and computational methods. We then detail the methods adopted by {\it GenderedNews} and the two metrics implemented: the masculinity rate of mentions and the proportion of men quoted in online news. We describe the data collected daily (seven main titles of French online news media) and the methodology behind our metrics, as well as a few visualisations. We finally propose to illustrate possible analysis of our data by conducting an in-depth observation of a sample of two months of our database.
HaT5: Hate Language Identification using Text-to-Text Transfer Transformer
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

We investigate the performance of a state-of-the art (SoTA) architecture T5 (available on the SuperGLUE) and compare with it 3 other previous SoTA architectures across 5 different tasks from 2 relatively diverse datasets. The datasets are diverse in terms of the number and types of tasks they have. To improve performance, we augment the training data by using an autoregressive model. We achieve near-SoTA results on a couple of the tasks - macro F1 scores of 81.66% for task A of the OLID 2019 dataset and 82.54% for task A of the hate speech and offensive content (HASOC) 2021 dataset, where SoTA are 82.9% and 83.05%, respectively. We perform error analysis and explain why one of the models (Bi-LSTM) makes the predictions it does by using a publicly available algorithm: Integrated Gradient (IG). This is because explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) is essential for earning the trust of users. The main contributions of this work are the implementation method of T5, which is discussed; the data augmentation using a new conversational AI model checkpoint, which brought performance improvements; and the revelation on the shortcomings of HASOC 2021 dataset. It reveals the difficulties of poor data annotation by using a small set of examples where the T5 model made the correct predictions, even when the ground truth of the test set were incorrect (in our opinion). We also provide our model checkpoints on the HuggingFace hub1 to foster transparency.